News 05.12.02-05.18.02

Saturday, May 18, 2002

Tips & Tricks: The iPod’s Icons

iLounger, Roland Y. informs us after having reset his iPod it displayed a sad iPod icon. Roland found the meaning of the sad iPod icon and others while searching the AppleCare Knowledge Base website. Unfortunately it was bad news, as Roland discovered that the sad icon indicates that the iPod “surface scan was not able to recover the hard disk data” and needs to be sent in for repairs. The following is a list of links to the AppleCare Knowledge Base articles explaining the meaning of some of the iPod’s icons:

iLounger, Namihiro S. informs us of a Japanese website depicting photos of an iPod disassembly. The author of the website has also tried to convert a Rio Remote control to operate his iPod, but did succeed. There is also a comparison of the iPod earbuds to the Sony MDR-EX70SL earphones.

Update: A representative at Griffin Technology has responded with the following reply:

“The Apple ProSpeaker jack is proprietary (it is NOT an 1/8th inch mini-jack) so it wouldn’t work on an iPod. However it will play the music from iTunes on your new iMac - which is synced to your iPod… Nice try, right?

That being said, stick around - we ‘may’ have an amplifier for the iPod in the future…”

“The ProSpeaker-Breakout Cable ($25) connects to Apple’s Pro Speaker Jack that is available on the new LCD iMacs and all PowerMac G4’s over 500 MHz, commonly referred to as the Digital Audio PowerMac G4. This is the same output that Apple uses to connect their Apple Pro Speakers. The other side of the cable contains a pair of spring loaded speaker connectors ready for connecting with speaker wire directly to your speakers. The power comes directly from the Mac - no additional hardware or software is necessary.”

Note: It’s unconfirmed, but imagine using the adapter to connect high-end speakers directly to your iPod! This new adapter allows speakers with traditional speaker wire to connect into the ProSpeaker Cable adapter, then plug the 1/8” jack into your iPod’s audio port. We’ve asked Griffin Technology to confirm if this adapter will work on the iPod.

Denis Geoffroy in France, has informed us he has developed a text to iPod application for Macintosh System 7 and higher.

“I wrote this quick’n dirty little app because I found no equivalent among the other sharewares (except some MacOS X specific programs).

iTeXpod lets you to transfer any text of any size to your Ipod. Entire books take just a few seconds to transfer!

As iPod (version 1.1) does not display correctly accentuated characters used in european languages, they are corrected by this version of iTeXpod.

When you launch the app you are prompted to select the text file you want to transfer. Then you are asked to select the name and the place where you want to record it. You may want to record it directly to the Contact folder of your iPod.

In order to facilitate the reading, a page number is generated every 7 lines.
Now you can transfer a full library in your shirt pocket for future reading even in the dark!”

Michael W. has made a request to buy a dead iPod for about $100 Canadian (about $64 US). He will be developing a website dedicated to the complete dissection and identification of the iPod’s inner workings. If anyone reading this has a dead, out of warranty iPod and is willing to sell it, email Michael W. at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

“We are interested in taking it apart fully and giving full images of the autopsy and identifying the parts (all parts) so we would be able to find the manufacturers of each part and give a bigger understanding of the iPods insides.”

“Amazon.com has dropped the price on the Apple iPod 5GB to $377.97, as a reader notes. That’s $22 off and shipping is free. You can still add the iPod and at least $80 worth of new music CDs to your cart and use coupon code “APPLEMP34MAY” to take $80 off the entire order. Offer ends May 30, 2002.”

iPoding reports of a release of new scripts for use with the iPod. Peter Stoltz has written five Python scripts in all. One of which enables you to download Major League Baseball standings and scores to your iPod. In order to use Python scripts, you have to have Python software installed for OS X. We recommend that you have working knowledge of using the command line in OS X before using these scripts.

MLB2iPod (v 1.0): Downloads the standings and recent Major League baseball scores from the USAToday website, writes .vcf files and moves them to “Contacts” folder on iPod.

“EntourageMail takes Entourage e-mail messages from a given folder and exports them into a vCard file called Email-folder.vcf. Since the application will only delete files for the folder currently being exported, you can easily export multiple folders to your iPod and update individual folders as required.

Each message includes the sender name and e-mail address, when it was sent and indicates if it has been read, forwarded, replied to, redirect or flagged (with the information only being displayed if it has). It will also indicate if the message has attachments.

iLounger, Welly C. writes in to inform us of a website with an exposed iPod. Chipmunk International has taken the iPod apart to give readers a look inside. They also have photos of an Apple Pro Mouse exposed.